Ethnicity

As Stanley Crouch likes to tell the tale, he and Philip Roth were having dinner in an up-scale New York City restaurant one evening shortly before their respective novels—The Human Stain in Roth's case, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome in Crouch's—hit the bookshelves. Because both men share a taste for good food, first-rate wine, and sophisticated cultural talk, it must have been quite a time. But at some point in the banter Roth proposed the following bet—namely, that none of the reviewers would mention that their novels were, in large measure, about moving beyond parochial boundaries, or about what I'm calling "climbing over the ethnic fence." At stake was the next dinner, with the loser picking up the check.